In 1990, teenagers Dave Miles and Aaron Mullan taught each other to play guitar over the phone while living in Annapolis, Maryland. "We'd sit at home on the phone and cue up the same cassettes and figure out Circle Jerks and Sex Pistols songs," the band told Mote Magazine in 2007. The pair started playing gigs eleven years after those jam-session phone calls, and drummer Ryan Sawyer (one of the first drummers in At The Drive-In) was later added to round out this power trio.

The Tall Firs are signed to Thurston Moore's record label, Ecstatic Peace! The Sonic Youth frontman has called the band's music "daring and delicious," and nowhere is that more apparent that Tall Firs' folksy self-titled debut. The album was released in Fall 2006, and the trio supported the record with a slew of tour dates with Metric frontwoman Emily Haines. The group now lives in New York, despite the fact their members hail from Texas and Maryland. "Our pants were too tight to hang in those towns any more," they explain.